Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 14.djvu/344

 338 Southern Historical Society Papers.

more men were kept in the work there than were considered sufficient to hold it, in case of an assault, until we could throw in reinforcements, which were held in readiness close at hand during night and day. At six o'clock on the evening of the 30th the enemy made a very deter- mined effort to carry our work by assault. While our men were eating their supper, with their guns lying beside them, a storming column swarmed out of the enemy's ditch only a short distance from our position, and made a dash upon us, gaining our exterior ditch, from which they drove the few men who were surprised there. A detachment of the Eighth Wisconsin, Fourth Wisconsin, and Fifth Michigan undertook to scale the parapet, but the first six men who got inside paid their lives as the entrance fee, and our men held their own until our reinforcements, coming in at a full run, attacked the troops in our ditch with such fury and impetuosity that they were immediately driven out.

We kept alarge force in the battery that night, but the attack not being resumed, as we anticipated, the reserve was withdrawn before daylight.

The engineers having decided that the point would undoubtedly be blown up by the enemy, the line of our fortifications was con- tinued across to the river behind Battery 11, so that when that was destroyed the enemy would find as strong a work still confronting them.

The exterior lunette, commanding a projecting ridge to the left of Battery 11, was also made the object of a concentrated fire, which razed to the ground a rifle-pit in front of it. This position was held at the time by Major Merchant, with a section of Boone's battery, and a detachment from Colonel de Gournay's command acting as infantry, the latter being afterwards relieved by Miles's Legion.

All this while the enemy were making slow but steady approach toward Colonel Johnson's position and that of the First Mississippi; at the latter place, expecting the point of the salient angle to be undermined and blown up, Lieutenant Dabney built a rifle-pit across the base of the angle, so as to present a new line of defence if the outer one was lost.

As a counter mine, a gallery was run out at some depth under ground, the prosecution of which was voluntarily assumed by Cap- tain Girard.

After working his gallery about half-way to the enemy's ditch, he could distinctly hear their workmen making slow progress with a gallery toward us. On account of the close proximity of their